On Friday, about 72 hours after Annie Le GRD ’13 was last seen entering 10 Amistad St. through its front doors, two Yale Daily News reporters walked through that same entrance.

They showed their Yale identification cards to a security guard and took the elevator down to the building’s basement. They walked out of the elevator and scoured the basement for information about what was, at the time, thought to be a missing person’s case. At one point, a group of investigators wearing FBI jackets passed them in the hallway but said nothing to them.

All the while, Le’s remains were hidden behind a wall somewhere on that same floor. But the building remained open to Yale faculty, staff and students until Sunday — five full days after Le was last seen — when investigators found Le’s corpse.

“That’s a no-no,” said Henry Lee, a retired commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Public Safety and a director of the Henry Lee Institute of Forensic Science at the University of New Haven. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

In a series of interviews conducted yesterday, law enforcement experts from around the country said they were surprised and concerned that authorities did not seal the research facility on Amistad Street as soon as it became clear that Le was missing and that a crime could have been committed inside the building.

But the circumstances surrounding Le’s disappearance were unclear, and investigators initially proceeded on the presumption that Le was missing or kidnapped — not trapped inside the laboratory at 10 Amistad St.

“For the first couple of days it was a missing person” case, New Haven Police Chief James Lewis told the New Haven Independent on Monday. “We have missing persons all over the country all the time. You can’t shut down a building for that.”

Indeed, as of Jan. 1, there were 102,764 missing persons in the United States, according to the FBI. But the experts still suggested that the building should have been sealed earlier than it was.

“Generally it’s a good idea to prevent people from coming into and out of a building where a crime occurred,” said Larry Williams Sr., a forensic security consultant and retired New Orleans police detective. “I would be very reluctant to let anyone go in that building or go out of that building.”

After all, Williams said, people might remove evidence — intentionally or unintentionally — or they could contaminate the evidence left at the scene.

“Police could look back on this later and say, ‘What if we’d had it tighter earlier?’ And at that point, you may never know,” said retired FBI agent Brad Garrett, who was one of the principal investigators in the Chandra Levy case. Garrett characterized the decision to close off access to the building as a “judgment call.”

For his part, University President Richard Levin said in an interview Monday night that access to the basement was limited before the rest of the building was sealed.

“Even in the first couple days when people were allowed in the basement there were law enforcement officials all over the place,” Levin said. “It was not unprotected.”

New Haven Police Department spokesman Joseph Avery pinned the decision to keep the building open on the Yale Police Department.

“It was all up to the Yale PD, not us,” he said.

James Perrotti, chief of the Yale Police Department, did not respond to repeated requests for comment last night.In an e-mail to the campus community, Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer said Monday that, in fact, the building still remains open to “those with essential research responsibilities,” though she said police are escorting those people in and out of the building. The building is otherwise closed to the public and press.

Yale officials have been hesitant in recent days to reflect on the investigation, saying it’s still ongoing and that it remains too early to know what — if anything — had gone wrong.

But Perrotti did acknowledge in an interview Thursday that the University could have moved more quickly to alert people on campus of Le’s disappearance.

Le, who was last seen entering the Amistad Street facility at 10 a.m. Tuesday, was reported missing at about 9 p.m. that night, though police did not inform media outlets until Wednesday afternoon and did not send a message to the entire campus community until Thursday morning.

“We would try to get that out earlier in the future,” Perrotti said of that e-mail. “Hindsight is always 20-20.”

Comments

Sandy

How awful it must be for the workers in that building to now know that for the past 5 days there was a dead body in the walls. The Yale PD should have sealed the building last Wednesday. No excuse for this.

Non-Student

“New Haven Police Chief James Lewis told the New Haven Independent on Monday. “We have missing persons all over the country all the time. You can’t shut down a building for that.”

Something that still puzzles me about the case, and I know that we don’t know all the facts, but how could it have taken so long to find the body? I mean, she’s been missing since Tuesday and they didn’t find her until Sunday.. According to the YDN “over 100 FBI agents” were on the case on 10 Amistad St not to mention the YPD people too (maybe I’m getting my facts wrong), but I mean if she was found in the place where she was last known to be, then something doesn’t add up to me.. Not saying that there is any foul play or blaming law enforcement of incompetence, just saying that this is a fact that I can’t seem to wrap my head around. And no, I’ve never been to this building, but with a 100+ personel (and apparently students too) and no evidence that Le ever left the building, you’d think that they would’ve found the body earlier..

Y09

They would not have unsealed the basement or building had they not felt that they had collected all the evidence necessary to proceed with a murder investigation. We don’t know how far along they actually are in their investigation. My guess is that they already have a strong lead on someone (or group of people even).

Trust the FBI, trust local law enforcement. They’re professionals. I pray that Dostoevsky was right and that this perpetrator’s despicable soul will crack eventually.

Understatementjones

The Chandra Levy case, of course, being a model investigation.

Anonymous

Perrotti is right about hindsight being 20/20. It was a missing persons case from the start. Look at it this way: if the case of that Yale student who decided to leave school and not tell anyone when he went to San Francisco last year was treated with the lockdown mentality they are describing below, then these same reporters would be blasting the school for overreacting to that crisis. And then the cost of the search/lockdown would need to be passed to the AWOL students (or they might face disciplinary measures) and this, again, would have these same reporters up in arms. Judgments will always be subject to questions, and most times those questions come from people who have no real qualification to be asking those questions. I am sure there’ll be a debate now over why Yale’s buildings are not more secure, and then in a few years, these same vocal teenagers will turn it around and cry about how Yale is too secure and that this infringes on their rights somehow. Now you see how hard it is to actually be a person of authority who has to make these same decisions. You can’t win.

Stephen

Is the stuff people working on more important than finding out what happen to Annie Le? Everybody that went into that building should give a statement to the police!

Jacques Bouvier

The Yale PD were right to keep the building open until the case stopped being a “missing persons case”. Many people work there and important research projects must be maintained.

thecaptainslady

Something is amiss here. As I watched the investigation unfold this past week, so many unanswered questions ran through my mind. I wondered if there was any sign of struggle in the laboratory where Annie worked. I wondered if other evidence had been left behind, a hair on the floor or a hand print on a lab table. I wondered if there was a working telephone in the room, and if Annie had used it after she entered the lab that morning. And after her body was found, I wondered how she had been stuffed into the wall. How could this happen without a trail of evidence? Oh my goodness, I hope the cleaning crew was barred from this area of the building!

Unlike so many other people, I did not automatically assume that Annie was running from her wedding. Why do we do this sort of thing to women? Yes, it was a possibility, but not a likely one, considering her joyful and widely publicized anticipation. The focus should have shifted early on to the possibility that a heinous crime had been committed, especially when it became apparent that Annie had not exited the building. At the very least, the lab where Annie worked should have been cordoned off. If the NHPD did not do it, then why not the Administrators of Yale University? Certainly, they had this power.

Given the situation, I am glad that the Yale Daily News sent reporters to the scene. I hope you looked hard at that room. I hope you peered into every nook and cranny. And I hope that important details will emerge as you continue to remember what you saw.

Building employee

That part of the basement is open to everyone. The other half of the basement contains the animal housing areas, which are under much more strict access control.

r

sympathies go out to Annie’a friends and family. Also to Yale, it is a tragedy for the whole university.

genevieve

Find job to the student reporters. Keep up the good work and the tough questions.

2009 Yale Alum

I was a new graduate student at Yale shortly after the murder of Suzanne Jovin. It seemed obvious that the NHPD were rank amateurs in conducting their investigation. What was more horrifying? The fact that Jovin was violently stabbed and left to die on the side of the road less than 30 minutes after she was last seen, or the fact that the police couldn’t manage to get any solid leads? Now they want to analyze a ten-year-old bottle of Fresca and track down some dude that ran across the street and gave one witness a funny look. This would all be so comic if it weren’t so tragic.

One of the only definitive statements that has come from the University and the Police Department is that the murder was not a “random act.” Just like Jovin’s. It may indeed be true, but their hastiness in declaring that seems an awful lot like CYA to me. No no, Yale is a safe place. These are anomalies. Keep sending your money and your children.

In this case, I really hope that the investigators are holding their cards close to their chests. No suspects, no imminent arrests? For a murder committed in a heavily secured room (or so they say)?

I am horrified and heartbroken about what happened to Annie Le. The details defy belief, and make me sick to my stomach. Apart from what this is doing to Yale and its sense of comfort and safety, it grieves me deeply to think about how many people and how many families close to her have been utterly destroyed. Their lives have now been sliced in two: the before and the after.

But now I am also angry. All I can think is, What the effin’ hell…they better not be bungling this (again).

Anon

Like asale, I hesitate to find fault with the investigation because we simply don’t know all of the facts yet. I am thoroughly confused by the delay in finding Annie’s body, though.

Wouldn’t the “bloody clothes in the ceiling” discovery lead investigators to immediately search inside the structure itself? If a piece of evidence is found buried in a field, wouldn’t it make sense that other evidence might be buried too, rather than just dropped on the grass?

Is it possible that they found her body long before it was reported? Could opening the building have been part of an intentional strategy?

Regarding Chief Lewis’ comment, I think he could have chosen better words. Missing person cases are extremely common, but their circumstances vary widely. In this case, you have a huge number of (extremely reputable) sources telling you that the situation is completely uncharacteristic of the subject. Implying that this was an average missing person case is misleading.

Annie’s fiancé, friends, family, the Yale community, and humanity in general have all been robbed by the loss of this special person and her contributions to the world.

Lala

The hallway showed in the picture is not at all a “high security” zone of the basement. It is basically the trash pickup area. Maybe the reporters wanted to show the “gloomiest” zone, and it is. The other areas, coming from the elevator, look nicer with the vending machines and access to the stairwell and outside (emergency exit). Also are the receiving dock and sorting area, the mail room, and other storage for heavy cleaning equipment. This hallway can be accessed directly from outside by swiping an ID (and a smile to the camera), or from inside the building through the elevators (after passing the camera and security desk, not gestapo) as most do. Many people have legitimate reasons to go in and out teh buiding without a background check. All that extra security was set up because of the politicized threats against the Stem Cell Center at that time.
It is unreasonable to ask for more security and personal body guards while at work, and since it seems that the criminal is a fully legitimate employee gone nuts, lack of security is not the issue here.
The police and FBI have methodically done everything they could considering the information they had at the time. Their dogs sniffed every inch of the building, and we moved boxes or small furniture to give access to hidden corners. They opened/removed any visible panel on walls and ceilings. It was very thorough. The place is full of sophisticated equipment and there is plenty of double walls to hide all the “guts and behinds” of electronic control panels and other venting apparatus so it looks nice and tidy. Who want to see the back of an autoclave?
I suppose that only after they were sure there was no gap in the security system, did they focus on an in-house criminal and looked at the blue prints to locate hidden cavities, most unknown even by those who work there. Why not blame the architects next?
Only a camera within the facility could have helped to find Annie sooner by tracking her steps further along, but it may not have been enough to prevent the crime. As Pres. Levin said, “you can’t stop evil”, and evil it was. One person’s mind snapped and all the security in the world can’t change that. I feel so sorry for Annie, her fiance, their families and friends. And I hope I never met the person who did it…

Science type

It would be interesting to know if there is cell phone signal available in the basement of 10 Amistad and the basements of other Yale buildings. One bit of constructive criticism would be for Yale to evaluate the density of phones in locations that are not always heavily populated and particularly where cell phone signals are weak. Certain people tend to avoid phone installations because they don’t want to pay the monthly charge on the upkeep. Not a great corner to cut. Same applies to other universities. Also take your cell phones with you!

Ex-YSM employee

Just because she was found in the basement does not mean that is where the crime occurred, or that is where her body was placed. The vertical chase may have several access points in the building, possibly above the ceilings in a horizontal utility space. If some of her personal items were found above the third floor ceiling, it is quite possible there is a chase access door nearby.

My feeling is that the delay in the investigation and in finding her body was in part the result of a deliberative linear approach, whereas an intuitive approach, often missing in facilities and security analysis, may have been needed.

Ridiculous!

This article and most of the comments are off base.

All you are doing is giving ammo to the defense once the scum who did this is caught and brought to trial. No way building should have been sealed since there was no reason to believe that a crime was committed there.

TL

The reason they did not find the body until Sunday is because the cadaver smelling dogs cannot pick up the scent of a body until it has reached a certain stage of decomposition. Gross I know but that’s why the delay. She must have been really well hidden.

But that building absolutely should have been sealed, especially once they found the bloody clothes. Whoever ends up being charged in the case, if anyone, will be able to present a strong case for having evidence recovered at the scene thrown out of court.

sharpvisions

I’m a person with special gifts, I called in the tip that lead them to the wall.

lala

There is practically no cell phone signal in the basement, nor in some parts of the building (garage side), and improvements regarding facilitating emergency calls is already on the adminstration’s agenda. There are a couple of phones in the main corridor of the animal facility, but retrospectively, an emergency “red button” linked to the building security in each room would be useful. I had never thought about such a need before this happened.
Annie’s lab and office were located in another building on Cedar Street. ID swiping is necessary only to access the animal facility or unguarded entrances, not to go upstairs. Even though there was no evidence she had left the basement, the police still scoured the whole building, so they did not leave any stone unturned.
They did close the building down as soon as they found the stained clothing in the ceiling on Saturday. People already there (upstairs) were asked not to wander around before leaving after their work was done.

y09

i’ve been the victim of two crimes while at yale (both thefts). and in both situations, we had to TELL the NHPD what to do in order to solve the crime. not kidding. and then the crime was solved.

like everyone else, i sincerely hope the killer is brought to justice, but honestly, i don’t have much faith in the NHPD’s crime investigation skills, and i won’t until someone is proven guilty.

y09

also, way to go, YDN! this was article brings up a lot of hard questions about the investigation, even if this part of the basement isn’t the most secure part. the fact that you were allowed to walk around, even after being seen by FBI agents (!!!), is absolutely ridiculous.

Veracity

#5 Understatementjones, I concur! The Chandra Levy case was one of the WORST high profile missing persons ever. TOO much time lapse before she was reported missing. Heads up to one and all, keep up with folks. KUDOS to Annie Le’s roomie who called police the very same day! DC Police took lead in Levy case, arguably a HORRIBLE DECISION! FBI assisted (sound familiar?). Both approached case initially more concerned about Chandra’s privacy, afterall she was a grown woman than FINDING HER. Her family became so frustrated THEY CALLED THE MEDIA! Chandra’s bags were packed and she was supposed to have returned to CA, she worked for the federal government as an intern. Her computer clearly showed one of the last things she did was go to ROCK CREEK PARK site. Authorities used Police CADETS, that’s right CADETS to walk the Park shoulder to shoulder – made all the papers and nightly news! Looked impressive! REALITY WAS FBI and DC POLICE DECIDED to IGNORE the RAVINE area in the Park because it was so “remote”. A YEAR LATER, her skull was discovered by some guy who was walking the area with his dog looking for turtles. Forensic evidence destroyed. Anyone who goes to Brad Garrett as an expert needs to ask WHAT POSITIVELY HAPPENED AFTER REVIEW OF THAT HORRIBLE CASE – were cameras installed in park? Were more police routinely patrolling? Were clearer defined rules made to ensure MISSING ADULT FEMALE CASES are immediately approached AS A POSSIBLE CRIMINAL CASE? Was a strategy to use an obvious resource, the media, developed and now deployed?

Veracity

In this article it mentions the number of missing persons listed in the FBI’s database. What is missing from the article are two very important facts –
police across our country have discovered unidentified remains and there is a SERIOUS flaw in our society -the FBI’s missing person database referenced is not complete. And at the same time unidentified remains records across our nation have never been integrated and cross referenced. In fact, some police forces across the nation have CREMATED remains! CT. Congressman Murphy DURING THIS SESSION of CONGRESS is supposed to introduce a bill to help fix our broken system. Everyone wanted Annie found alive. And if that was not to be, then the next #1 hope was to find her so that her family and friends and the Yale community would not have to suffer a moment more than necessary wondering where Annie was and what happened to her? Yale is an IVY LEAGUE school, one of our best! This school produces many powerful and influential people. I hope and pray that Annie’s case will make many question the way privacy laws currently interfere and at times hamper missing person cases and I hope voices will be heard to move forward positive laws to fix and fortify our efforts to FIND MISSING PEOPLE. MAKE IT MANDATORY so that the media and the police work together from the earliest moments a person is unaccounted. And each case be approached as a possible criminal case so as to rally help, create an urgency, and prevent mistakes. I have been sickened to hear Annie’s case represented as “an isolated case” by leaders in the community like the Mayor. Thank you Yale Daily for reminding all of us there were as of Jan.1 2009 over 102,764 other missing persons cases! Here is a link for Chris Murphy’s office release about the bill he is going to (may already have) introduced. http://www.chrismurphy.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=344&Itemid=55

Natalie

Just a hunch… but sometimes the FBI will pull a trick like this. In crimes such as this, a murder is very likely to go back to the scene… whether it is to admire their work or to see if they left any evidence behind. It may be very likely that the crime scene is open to see if someone is caught trying to clean up their tracks. Plus, FBI may also give out “leaks” to scare their suspect. The police said they had a whole lot of evidence. I’m sure it’s scaring the suspect… so why not go back to the scene just to make sure their tracks are cleared. Just sayin’

Observer

Lala, thank you for your 1st hand insights on this.

Ella

Why don’t other violent crimes in New Haven get this kind of media coverage/FBI investigations? Weren’t three young children the victims of gun violence over the summer?

Trumbull 08

Honestly, I hate how much Yale and the news have insisted on reminded us how “secure” the building was.

Yes, we have ID cards. But can any Yalie honestly claim that they haven’t opened a college gate to a random stranger at some point? Some random bloke says “I lost my card, can you key me in” and we don’t blink and eye. Once inside a gate, it’s a matter of waiting for someone else to open a door and an unauthorized person can simply follow (say nothing of people who let doors propped, no matter how restricted an area is). Honestly, given the right motivation, it really doesn’t take that much to sneak into any of these buildings.

It’s a very scary thought the more I think about it. Think back on all the times I let someone into a building, the possibility of anything leading to this is terrifying. Then again, the thought of an insider doing it scares me even more. I just hope Yale and the NHPD can get their act together soon and apprehend the culprit of this case.

As for how long it took to find the body — yea, no explanation there. I’m having a hard time simply understanding what they mean by having the body hidden in a wall (and really, it makes me sick to my stomach to try). That said, it sounds like the kind of thing that should leave some visible evidence that should have led the police to find the body faster. Honestly, if it took us that long to find the body, it doesn’t bode well for the swift resolution we’d all hope for this case.

Peggy sue

Ififififififif the police should have closed building down immediately thats for sure!!!!! I hope Annie Le’s parents don’t read any of these postings as it makes me sick to think what this poor girl suffered. God bless Annie Le and most of all lets all pray for her parents that their suffering won’t be in vain and that this monster in the Basement gets his punishment as soon as possible.

anonymous

I only looked for this story when I saw one of the editors (I think) proudly bragging on Larry King about how some reporters got to go into the crime scene prior to it being sealed. So stupid. The police involved (campus and New Haven) will have a hard time in court explaining why it did not seal the building immediately and those reporters better hope that they will not be called to testify in this case for possibly tampering with evidence. This is NOT TV or a movie. This is real life and these actions could be met with consequences. Sometimes it is not about getting the sensational story-it should be about using common sense and respecting bounderies. My heart goes out to the Annie Le’s family in this tragedy.

SmartestOne

In some news article I read — sorry, don’t have a link — that NHPD delayed investigating Annie’s disappearance seriously (ergo did not initially consider foul play) because they initially thought she was a “Runaway Bride.” That was the reason given for them only discovering her body five days later…